To insure a high availability rate in communications network services provided to customers, service providers require accurate and responsive maintenance efforts. The network management services that support these maintenance efforts are a vital part of a service provider's marketability.
In conventional customer enabled maintenance systems, a connection is made with a large legacy system via a dial-up connection from a customer owned personal computer or work station. This connection frequently, although not always, emulates a terminal addressable by the legacy system. The dial-up access requires custom software on the customer workstation to provide dial-up services, communication services, emulation and/or translation services and generally some resident custom form of the legacy application to interface with the mid-range or mainframe computer running the legacy system.
There are several problems associated with this approach:
First, the aforementioned software is very hardware specific, and customers generally have a wide range of workstation vendors, which requires extensive inventory for distribution, and generally, intensive customer hand holding through initial setup and installation before reliable and secure sessions are possible. If the customer hardware platform changes through an upgrade, most of these issues need renegotiation.
Secondly, dial-up, modem, and communications software interact with each other in many ways which are not always predictable to a custom application, requiring extensive trouble shooting and problem solving for an enterprise wishing to make the legacy system available to the customer, particularly where various telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards are involved.
Third, when an enterprise wishes to make more than one system available to the customer, the custom application for one legacy system is not able to connect to a different legacy system, and the customer must generally logoff and logon to switch from one to the other. The delivery technology used by the two legacy systems may be different, requiring different interface standards, and different machine level languages may be used by the two systems, as for example, the 96 character EBCDIC language used by IBM, and the 127 character ASCII language used by contemporary personal computers.
Finally, the security and entitlement features of the various legacy systems may be completely different, and vary from system to system and platform to platform.
It is therefore desired to provide connectivity to enterprise legacy systems over the public Internet, as the Internet provides access connectivity world wide via the TCP/IP protocol, without need to navigate various telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards.
One such type of legacy system for the telecommunications industry is known as a fault management system which can provide a range of services to larger customers of the enterprise. A subset program within the fault management tools has been known to the public as “trouble tickets”, the tool which allows a “trouble ticket” to be opened in response to a telecommunications network fault or a service problem.
In conventional dial-up trouble systems, service providers utilize trouble ticketing as a means for identifying reported network problems, failures, or customer inquiries. When a network problem, failure, or customer inquiry is reported, a trouble ticket describing the network problem, failure, or customer inquiry is opened. Generically, the trouble ticket is an electronic tracking mechanism that may exist as a data record in a database. In this example, the data record includes information describing the failure event, time of occurrence, etc.
In operation, the status of the trouble ticket is considered open as long as the network condition remains unresolved. At any given time, the collection of open trouble tickets represents the set of ongoing and future repair efforts of the service provider. This mechanism provides the service provider with a convenient method for identifying the status of current and future repair efforts.
Customers also desire access to this information. Generally, a customer's assessment of a particular network management service is not based solely upon the time frame of repair for the current network failure. In other words, the customer does not want to report a network problem, failure, or customer inquiry and passively wait for resolution. Customers desire information on the status of open trouble tickets.
Thus, what is needed is a system and method for allowing a customer to remotely access a service provider's trouble ticketing system. This remote access must enable a customer to seamlessly open a trouble ticket and identify the status of all trouble tickets pertaining to his organization.
Customers further desire an open access route to this information. The rapid adoption and use of the internet for data exchange has also prompted a desire on the part of customers to access their data over the internet.